Separation of church and state in the European Union

“There is a movement in the European Union that wants total religious neutrality and can’t accept our Christian traditions,” said Archbishop Zvolensky, [the Roman Catholic archbishop of the Slovak capital] bemoaning what he sees as a rising tide of militant secularism at a time when Europe is struggling to forge a common identity. 

There go those "militant" secularists again. What an irritant they must be, huh? So what made Zvolensky so upset?

[T]he National Bank of Slovakia announced that the European Commission, the union’s executive arm, had ordered it to remove halos and crosses from special commemorative euro coins due to be minted this summer. The coins, designed by a local artist, were intended to celebrate the 1,150th anniversary of Christianity’s arrival in Slovak lands...

Ah, I see. The nasty old EU won't let Slovakia plaster government-issued coins with halos and crosses, thus blocking the god-given right of Christians to place their religious symbols wherever the hell they please. Those darned militant secularists! They're always ruining everything.   

Yup, it's the same old story. Christians want to paint the world with crosses and gods and mentions of heaven and grace and sin. But those nasty secularists keep stopping them! To deluded Christians, this is "religious persecution". Horrors!

Christians will never understand that they can't force the world to worship their god. They see their pushing of religious iconography into the public sphere as a god-given right. It's not. It's religious piggery.

Feel free to worship your stupid, nonexistent god, but leave the rest of us alone. That shouldn't be so hard to understand. But to religiously damaged minds, apparently it is.

“I need to voice a serious and disturbing suspicion: that the E.U. is under the control of Satan or Satanism,” said Rafael Rafaj of the Slovak National Party, a far-right nationalist party. 

The view that the European Union serves Satan has become a popular theme for some extreme Christian fundamentalists, who cite the Bible’s Book of Revelation as proof that dissolving national boundaries signals an approaching apocalypse. 

Sigh.